On Feb 10, 2012, at 9:47 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:
> (Interesting comments by Andrew Pollack and Jon Flanders on Lou Proyect's Marxmail list)
>
>> So last night I went to an incredibly energizing Occupy the DOE (Department
>> of Education) event, where 3,000 young, very diverse teachers and students
>> tried to stop a vote to close dozens of schools...what if black blockers tried to
>> do their criminally stupid acts at an ODOE event?!
But of course they wouldn't. Does anything think they would?
I don't get the intensity of debate over the BB. Sure, they do some stupid, annoying stuff, but how much does that matter? Cops don't attack because of the BB - they attack because that's what cops do, repress, often violently. How many people have ever been beaten or arrested because of provocations by the BB, and not because cops were acting according to type? You could have an argument over whether the port shutdown/general strike in Oakland was a good idea (either in concept or execution), or whether the general strike called for NYC on May 1 is a good idea. But those sorts of things are different from the BB approach.
Two other things. You're not going to get even significant reforms unless people in power are scared, and to scare them, you need some violence. No one will listen to sensible reformers without the threat of something worse to which they appear like comfortable alternatives. And a large portion of the pop is always going to see a radical movement as threatening. Nothing you can do about that. Even the civil rights movement, which is now mostly seen as unambiguously virtuous, was regarded with deep suspicion at the time. As Dorian Warren pointed out, polls showed that many, maybe most, people agreed with their goals but not their tactics. Any challenge to orthodoxy is always going to be seen as violent in some sense. The amount of destruction in Seattle was trivial, but in mainstream memory, it was like a Richter 8 earthquake.
Doug